Plan and billing

/admin/settings/subscription is where you manage what your business pays The Contractor Codex. It has nothing to do with what your clients pay you; that lives under Payments. This page is your plan, your billing cycle, your card, and your cancel button.

What the page shows

A plain summary of your subscription, pulled live from Stripe:

• Plan: the exact price and billing interval (per month or per year).
• Status: Active, Free trial, Past due, Paused, or Canceled.
• Next payment: the amount and the date it will be charged. If a cancellation is pending, this becomes the date your access ends instead.
• Payment method: the card or bank account on file, shown by brand and last four digits.

During your free trial

While you're trialing, a banner at the top spells out the only two facts that matter: the exact amount of your first payment and the exact date it will be charged, with a day countdown. Cancel any time before that date and you are charged nothing; you keep full access until the trial ends either way. The cancel button even says so: Cancel Trial (No Charge).

Updating your payment method

Click Update Payment Method (or Add Payment Method if none is on file). This opens Stripe's secure billing portal, where you can change your card, download past invoices, and edit billing details. Your card number never passes through the portal itself; Stripe handles it end to end.

Switching between monthly and annual

The Standard plan is $15 per month or $150 per year, so annual works out to two months free. The page always offers the switch you don't currently have:

• Monthly to annual: Stripe credits the unused part of the current month and applies it toward the annual charge today.
• Annual to monthly: Stripe credits the unused part of your annual term against your next monthly invoices.

Either way the proration shows up on your next invoice; you never pay twice for the same period.

Standard vs Pro

Pro lowers the service fee on every client invoice from 0.8% to 0.1%. It keeps your current billing cycle, and Stripe prorates the difference when you switch. As a rule of thumb, Pro pays for itself once you're billing more than about $2,900 a month through the portal. You can switch back to Standard at any time.

Pausing billing

Pause Billing stops invoices without ending your subscription. Your access and all your data stay active while paused, and you can resume whenever you're ready. It's built for short breaks, the off season, a slow month, where cancelling and re-signing would be overkill.

Cancelling

Cancel Subscription schedules the cancellation for the end of your current billing period. Until that date you keep full access and pay nothing further; after it, the subscription ends. Changed your mind? A Resume Subscription button appears while the cancellation is pending, and clicking it puts everything back to normal renewal.

Common errors, decoded

• "Cancellation is pending, undo it first": you can't switch plans while a cancellation is scheduled. Resume first, then switch.
• "Your subscription is past due": update your card in the Stripe portal before changing plans.
• "You're already on that plan": nothing to do; the page refreshed with stale buttons. Reload.

No subscription at all? The page shows a Start a Subscription button that takes you through signup.